We’ve got your Assist of the Day #6 with Coach UltraDavid. FB member Cody Hann sent us a video last week in hopes of improving his MvC3 skills. Lucky for him, tournament player David Philip Graham aka UltraDavid was able to lend a hand and provide insight and tips to help Cody improve his X-23/Ryu/Doom team as well as his overall game.

You can follow UltraDavid on Twitter  @UltraDavid  and Facebook:  www.facebook.com/UltraDavidFB

—————–

Be sure to check out previous “Assist of the Day” videos if you’ve missed any!

Assist of the Day Kickoff- Michael Rodriguez and Viscant

Assist of the Day #2- Mark Ruffin and jchensor

Assist of the Day #3- Jorge Pupo and NerdJosh

Assist of the Day #4- Dewitt Ward and ClockW0rk

Assist of the Day #5- Christopher Paloma and Maximilian

——————-

Cody’s gameplay video

Hit the jump to read UltraDavid’s feedback for Cody!

——————-

Hey all!  This is my first Assist of the Day, for FantomWolph’s X23/Ryu/Doom. I’m gonna be a little more general in my critique than Viscant, James, and NerdJosh have been, if you don’t mind.  I think it’s more helpful to address larger concerns first and then approach smaller things, like when to activate xfactor or why not to whiff moves or how to punish what with what, after you’ve picked up the big stuff.

One of the toughest things for many players (including me!) to get about MvC3 is that it’s a team game.  That is, you don’t have three separate characters who come one after the other while sometimes interacting, you have a single team made up of three component characters who have to work very well together for you to succeed.  To get yourself into that state of mind, realize that there are no 100% kill combos in this game.  A combo that takes out an entire character really only takes out 33% of your health bar.

In general I think the most successful teams have some kind of theme behind them, and I don’t mean like Team Law & Order (Shehulk the lawyer, Chris the cop, Haggar the mayor… womp womp).  The theme can be relentless offense, like with Justin Wong’s Shehulk/Wolverine/Akuma-tatsu; frustrating keepaway, like with Gllty’s Sentinel/Dormammu/Doom-missiles; steady approach, like with Combofiend’s Shehulk/Taskmaster-horizontal/Spencer-diagonal; Phoenix time, like with Viscant’s Wesker/Tron/Phoenix; or whatever else you can think of.  The point is that your team should want to do something and have as many tools as possible to do it.

So let’s jump in here by looking at your team.  You’re running X23-???, Ryu-???, Doom-beam.  What does this team want to do?  What’s its identity? 

Before I watched you play I tried to think about what I’d expect your team to try to do, and I couldn’t really come up with much.  X23 can play some nice offense, but how does having Ryu help her with that?  She can kill characters by starting a DHC trick (that is, using a capture-type super and then DHCing to a non-hitting super, which resets all damage scaling and hit stun reduction and allows for a very damaging post-super combo), but Ryu can’t continue it, so he can’t help her with that either.  Doom beam is ok for helping her approach, but it’s really too fast to approach behind or make some of her options safer, so is he really necessary? 

Watching the vid didn’t really address my concerns.  It looks to me like you have three separate characters on your team instead of a cohesive unit.  I kinda think you have to decide which of these characters to keep.

X23 makes sense as a point character (that is, the character you want playing out most of the time).  She has decent tools to approach, can build meter well, begins the DHC trick well, can get good damage or mixups, and so on.  I like her here. 

Ryu is a different story.  He can play defensively with fireballs.  He can do some kinda tricky hurricane stuff in the air (some of which you used, so good stuff).  But he has crappy assists and can’t continue or start DHC tricks, so what’s he doing paired with X23?  And he already has his own projectiles, so does he really need Doom beam backing up?

As for Doom, beam can help set up some characters’ offenses really well, but I don’t think X23 or Ryu make very good use of it.  And while I think Doom has the ability to be a good anchor (that is, the character who backs up your team and can turn around a losing match), not many people have gotten him there yet.  He’s really difficult to use well, with hard execution and nonobvious tricks and strategies.  In this game the third position is really important because third characters get giant comeback potential with level 3 xfactor.  Different characters get different damage and speed boosts in xfactor, and the best real anchors are for the most part the characters who make the best use of their boosts.  Comebacks are much easier in this game than in virtually any game ever; make sure you give yourself a chance to do them.  Again, I think Doom has the ability to be a good anchor, I just think very few people bring that out in him.  Putting him in your third spot might not be a great idea until you’ve gotten better control of him. 

I think this whole point about the team nature of this game is driven home by the fact that you never used assists.  You used precisely two Doom beams, one when X23 was full screen before she was moving in, and the other just before Ryu got hit.  I think this might say two things.  On the one hand, you might not be looking at MvC3 as a team game so much as a game of three characters.  Like I said, I had that attitude at first too and it wasn’t productive.  On the other hand, you might not be using assists that help your team enough for you to bother calling them much.

Choosing the right assists and calling them at the right times are among the most important skills you can have in MvC3.  You don’t want to call them too often for fear of getting them killed, but you do want to call them often enough that you can really use them.  Different assists should be called in different situations.  Doom beam is not an assist to call just before getting hit, for example; Doom is too vulnerable, it starts up too slow, and the beam is too easily evaded.  Tron flame is not something to call to help you gain ground, Akuma tatsu is really really good for covering an approach, Deadpool kitanarama is pretty much only there to get more OTGs during combos, and so on. 

Think about which assists would be good for whichever of your characters you want to keep.  If you want to keep X23, look at Hori|Tatsu’s team.  Tatsu makes great use of Deadpool OTG and Sentinel drones for his X23.  Deadpool keeps his combos going and Sent provides him with one of the best approach, mixup, and hit confirm assists in the game.  I love his team, I think it’s really well designed.  A good point character in X23 with great assists supporting her; a 2nd character with a very different playstyle who can address matchups X23 has problems with and who can also make great use of Sent drones assist; a good anchor in Sentinel who can make huge comebacks; and a unifying theme in the ability to do 100% damage DHC trick combos between every character (it’s called Team One Hit Kill for a reason).  I’m not saying you should choose the same team, but if you’re gonna stick with X23 (and I don’t know that you are, this is just an example), I think you can learn a lot about team design and especially X23 from the way Tatsu has identified, supported, and addressed X23’s strengths and weaknesses in his character and assist selection.

Something else I’d like to bring up is your movement.  There are many things that separate top play from lower levels, but probably the most immediately obvious is how a top level player makes his characters move.  Have you seen Clockw0rk’s Doom?  Justin Wong’s Thor?  Nerses’ Magneto?  Check them out if you haven’t.  They’re so fast and so mobile and they control so much of the screen that you can tell right away they’re really, really good.  On the other end of the spectrum, check out Combofiend’s Spencer.  He has such an economy of motion with Spencer, such tight control over what his character is doing at all times, such patience, and such strong setups that his talent is obvious.  Once when James Chen and I asked Clockw0rk how he made Doom look so fast when our Dooms both looked so useless, he just told us, Hey, this is Marvel, your character is as fast as you make it.  Or, as in the case of Combo’s Spencer, as slow. 

The point is that you have to figure out how to move with your characters better.  Your X23 was really stuck on the ground even though she has a great toolset in the air with those air dashes and dives.  Your Ryu didn’t seem to be certain what he wanted to do.  At times he was playing fireball distance games, at other times he was playing unseeable crossup tatsus in the air, at other times he was fishing for standing H midscreen.  Same thing for your Doom, I felt like he was playing offense sometimes and defense others and not really sure why he was doing either at any one time, and all the while he wasn’t moving very fast. 

One way to address this is to go into training mode and literally just move around.  Practice airdashing, diving, and using hurricane kicks.  Practice triangle jumps (that is, with an 8-way airdash character like Doom, jumping toward into the air and immediately airdashing down toward to move forward quickly) and square jumps (jumping up, then airdashing toward).  Practice wavedashing (moving quickly on the ground by inputting dash, then down to cancel it, then dash again, then down again, then dash, etc).  Try out Doom’s funky ability to cancel all of his normals into dashes and see if you can get any juice out of that.  Like I said, my Doom had terrible movement, but after spending some time in the gym, I’m starting to address that.

The last issue I’ll bring up is probably the most obvious and the most straightforward to change: getting max damage.  You didn’t get the biggest damage combos you could have.  I won’t harp on this.  I’m sure you already know, I’m sure you know you can check out the forums at www.Shoryuken.com or watch match vids to find better combos, and I’m sure you know how important training mode is in nailing those combos.  Also, honestly, I find combos pretty tedious to talk about.  I’m just into fighting games for the strategy, not for Simon Says Beatmania boredom.  But your strategy in any game is only as strong as its payoff, and in fighting games that payoff comes in the forms of damage and positioning.  Make sure you’re getting both, because without them, you don’t have much strategy either.

So those are my main critiques: team construction, playing as a team, damage output, and movement.  Hope you put in the time, and I look forward to seeing your play again soon!  Good luck!

—————————

Whew! Cody, hope you were able to take in all of that! Let us know what you think and don’t forget to keep sending in your Assist of the Day videos!